Donald Trump famously deploys a confusing and borderline incoherent style of discourse that he assures us is deliberate: He calls it “the weave,” which my colleague Margaret Hartmann defines as a “free association word salad.” Aficionados of Trump’s rhetoric have probably noticed that “the weave” gets more impenetrable when he is asked to address difficult subjects like his position on abortion. Language aside, the 47th president also sometimes sows deliberate confusion about his position on highly controversial issues. That’s important to keep in mind when trying to understand his most recent statements about Elon Musk’s DOGE and its power to ravage and remake the federal government.
Amid public protests and private complaints from members of Congress about the chaos and errors surrounding DOGE’s “go fast and break things” assault on federal employees and programs, Trump held a Cabinet meeting that, according to the New York Times, produced heated interchanges between Musk and at least two department heads (Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy). What Trump did to resolve these disputes is much less clear. Politico suggests the president laid down the law:
President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet in person on Thursday to deliver a message: You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk.
According to two administration officials, Trump told top members of his administration that Musk was empowered to make recommendations to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy.
The president’s message represents the first significant move to narrow Musk’s mandate. According to Trump’s new guidance, DOGE and its staff should play an advisory role — but Cabinet secretaries should make final decisions on personnel, policy and the pacing of implementation.
If true, that would be a major development. But Trump did the functional equivalent of the weave in a subsequent Truth Social post:
The Golden Age of America has just begun! Over the past six weeks, our Administration has delivered on promises like no Administration before it, always putting America First! DOGE has been an incredible success, and now that we have my Cabinet in place, I have instructed the Secretaries and Leadership to work with DOGE on Cost Cutting measures and Staffing. As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go. We say the “scalpel” rather than the “hatchet.” The combination of them, Elon, DOGE, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level.
We just had a meeting with most of the Secretaries, Elon, and others, and it was a very positive one. It’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people. We’re going to have these meetings every two weeks until that aspect of this very necessary job is done. The relationships between everybody in that room are extraordinary. They all want to get to the exact same place, which is, simply, to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
All one big happy team, right? Actually, it looks more like Trump will “rein in” Musk only if his appointees do what DOGE tells them to do. After the Cabinet meeting, Trump told reporters “he wanted cuts, and that Musk would remain a power center: ‘If they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.’” That doesn’t sound to me like a definitive brushback pitch aimed at Musk’s head.
What may actually be going on is an effort to regularize DOGE’s activities legally by treating them not as decision-makers but as advisers to both the president and to agency heads. Multiple federal judges have signaled that DOGE has no authority beyond a very general executive order from Trump to intervene in agency personnel and policy decisions. Indeed, one judge halted the peremptory firing of probationary employees by the DOGE-dominated Office of Personnel Management as having exceeded that entity’s powers. So masking DOGE actions by channeling them through individual agency heads could be the play, creating the impression Musk is on a leash without diminishing his authority in any meaningful way.
In view of Trump’s famous mob-boss management style, suffused with paranoia and incessant demands for personal loyalty, he may have also been subtly reminding Musk that his authority flows entirely from the Oval Office and can be withheld if he gets too big for his britches. But barring further clarification, it’s likely that DOGE personnel will operate as extremely powerful commissars throughout the federal bureaucracy, manipulating the formal decision-makers to act in accordance with Musk’s vision of a radically diminished, MAGA-compliant, and AI-driven workforce. It would be naïve to assume the Trump-Musk partnership that helped create the 47th presidency is at any sort of an end or has even achieved a sustainable balance of power. These are two very complicated and dangerous men.
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